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American Hardwoods: Beyond Design John Chan, Regional Director, AHEC Southeast Asia & Greater China tells Goh Tz’en Long how he came to be involved with AHEC and the latest initiatives spearheading the use of American hardwoods. Can you tell us more about yourself and how you came to be involved with AHEC? I have been working for AHEC (American Hardwood Export Council) since 1992. Before I joined AHEC, I was also in the forest products industry, being involved with pulp and paper. I like to work with forest products because of my previous experience and also because joining AHEC gave me the chance to work in China. As I have worked in China before for a number of years, I know the people,
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not the hardwood industry but the forest industry which is a related industry. When I started in 1992, I had some good experience in the China market, but not much in Southeast Asia.
Can you tell us about the activities of AHEC in Greater China? Our major activity is still AHEC’s programmes to exhibit in trade shows, conduct seminars and organise conventions. We also organise trade missions. In addition to this, we have developed very
good PR programmes in Southeast Asia and Greater China. At the same time, we also conduct workshops on flooring. About eight years ago, workshops were a big event, similar to conventions. The flooring workshops we organised lasted for one week. We had to ship the equipment, the material from the US and then the workshop size had to be less than 100 people because when we talk about workshop, it means that the participants, when they come to the workshop, don’t just sit there to listen to the speaker or presentation. The participants will have handson; they get to learn how to practice installation and finishing of the floors so this is one of the biggest challenges, because you don’t just get people to come and allocate places for people to sit down. Participants also get the equipment and learn how to install and finish the floors. That is one of AHEC’s biggest programmes and about five speakers from the US are invited for the fiveday workshop. This is not a one-city event but a regional one. We invite contractors from Southeast Asia and China. The workshops that we had before, usually catered for 60 people but ended up with 80. I consider it a big event. We never had a five-day event. The AHEC Convention is a two day event. We are going to organise this event in China and Southeast Asia in 2007. We realise that this flooring seminar is very important to convince the architects, the interior designers, the developers and consumers to use American hardwood products. Before they decide to use, they will need to know the proper installation methods which will avoid problems arising later.
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American hardwoods can be used for many different applications. In the china market, which areas do you feel have the greatest potential? In the China market, American hardwoods can be used in furniture and decorative woodworks and the market is growing very fast. People thought five years ago that the material used to make these products were mainly driven by the export oriented market. But nowadays, if you talk about two years from now, the domestic market is growing very fast. In a way the growth rate in the next five years will be as fast if not faster than the export market. The market for American hardwood is for interiors, furniture and decorative woodwork. AHEC will allocate resources in our
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design concepts and design excellence. Our seminars are centred on design concepts. A piece of wood through the interpretation of the designer becomes a different product. But on the other hand, we find out that the architects and interior designers also want to learn in general about the technical aspects of American hardwoods. They want to know how the wood performs and the physical properties. When we conduct a flooring seminar or flooring workshop, we will also invite the key architectural firms to send someone to participate in the seminar because this will involve the technical aspects, the installation method, how the contractor handles the wood, the flooring, the material product
In the China market, American hardwoods can be used in furniture and decorative woodworks and the market is growing very fast.
AHEC is also very actively involved in furniture design and architecture. Can you tell us about some of the latest initiatives? As I mentioned, we realised that the domestic market is important. So what kind of programmes can we organise in order to support our strategy? Working with the architects, specifiers and interior designers will help our products to be used in the domestic market. So in the future, we will work with the architects, the associations, architectural societies, the interior design association in China, and we will conduct more and more design seminars involved with
in an environment different from the country of origin. So design concept is not related to physical property of the wood but we have two different kinds of seminars and we regard both as important. The future activities that we plan are going in that general direction. The speakers we invite are well known architects from overseas and they have a lot of experience and successful case studies which can be used as references and in the coming conferences as well as for previous ones, we have invited architects and interior designers to deliver speeches on different topics. They will present successful projects so that this will illustrate that US hardwoods can be used successfully. FDM
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promotional programmes to look into the domestic market.
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